Projects are expensive to plan and execute. They consume labor resources, sometimes at a voracious rate. Supplies may be pricey, with scant wiggle room on specifications and little bargaining power to control costs. Strategic initiatives might create temporary disruptions that slow or complicate day-to-day workflows and hinder productivity. But projects are also typically time sensitive, with stakeholders wanting things done as quickly as possible. How can you balance maintaining a firm hold on your budget while still compressing the schedule?
If your project faces time pressures, there are some core factors that will help you assess the financial implications of accelerated timelines and enable you to confidently balance the need for speed with budget constraints.
Labor allocations and consumption: There are two sides to the resource allocation coin, and both need to be understood and evaluated to determine whether speed or financial outlays are more important. In many instances, fast-tracking a project or a select group of key elements requires more personnel. That could mean internal staff, temporary or contract employees, consultants, or other vendors. In addition, achieving speed sometimes requires running multiple work streams in parallel, leading to the associated increase in costs to support more resources working simultaneously. Rather than selecting the vendor with the lowest prices, you may need to secure services from other, higher-cost providers as well to fill the gap.
Quality control: You don’t want people cutting corners in their haste to complete activities more quickly. A compressed schedule may put people under pressure to perform beyond their abilities. Rushed work can lead to poor quality, which leads to other problems. For example, cybersecurity risks may go unnoticed if the team doesn’t have enough time to fully evaluate and fix vulnerabilities before rolling out a new software platform. Implementing additional quality assurance and quality control checks and related tasks might be a necessary expansion of your normal QA/QC protocols to maintain standards in a time-pressured project environment. Not only can this cost more than your typical QA/QC process, it also has the potential to inadvertently slow other project elements due to the need to activate the quality loop more than usual.
Regulatory requirements: Increasing expenditure levels to accelerate some or most of your project’s activities may be for naught if the compliance component of your initiative cannot speed up to align with an earlier delivery date. Some regulatory frameworks have strict stipulations around time gaps between activities, while others have a wider tolerance. Milestones that can’t move up to match your compressed schedule mean you’ll have downtime instead of finishing sooner. Consider how much control you have over task sequences tied to compliance reviews, onsite audits, and approvals to ensure you don’t pay extra for little or no gain on the time side of things.
Opportunity costs: Evaluation of whether the benefits of early delivery justify the increased costs of fast-tracking is a crucial exercise. Will the additional money you plan to spend to move your project to completion sooner be offset by either reduced costs elsewhere or increased revenue overall? Will you get your product to market before your high-performing competitor? Will your company be better positioned to successfully negotiate a merger or acquisition? You must also understand the risks of completing the project on a longer timeline. If your initiative would be subject to more intricate regulatory rules as a result of finishing later, then the risk of missing a favorable time window might make the additional expense worthwhile. Alternatively, if the data doesn’t show a clear benefit of accelerating your project schedule, the extra cost outlays could represent a poor business decision.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.